When in the sixth grade we were living in South Texas and living near us was a man, Mr. Brooks, who owned a Taylorcraft. He kept it in the singular hangar on a caliche airstrip just east of town. He allegedly used it to fly their company’a pipelines while looking for leaks – only that company did not have enough pipelines to justify a plane, so it was just an expensive hobby for him.

I asked him a lot of questions about the plane and he later asked if my parents would mind if I flew with him. Naturally, they didn’t.

I flew with Mr. Brooks off and on for two years. His vision was getting bad from cataracts. It got to where he trusted me to fly while he "looked for stuff." This was supposedly for deer, Javalinas, and leaky pipelines. He started trusting me to fly lower and lower, as long as my airspeed was well above stall speed.

One day Mr. Brooks yelled at me from his house and asked if I wanted to fly some. We went out and by this time I helped roll it out of the hangar, prepped the plane, maybe put some fuel in it, drained the fuel sump to clear the line of condensation (water). It ran good and always started easily.

Once he said, "Kenneth, there is no wind...why don’t you taxi it down to the south end and turn it around for take off." This was a tail-dragger and in a hard tail wind, once the tail gets blown a little to the side, the wind can swing it all the way around and leave the pilot embarrassed and pointing the opposite direction from the way he had been taxiing. This isn’t good for the plane either if on ground as rough as this airstrip was.

I taxied well enough. I am a good observer.

He said, "My eyes are getting worse, but I like to fly sometimes...do you think you can get us off the ground?"

I lied and said, "Sure! Once up – what heading do you want – what altitude?"

This was more than he had thought about. He said, "Just climb straight out to 2,000 feet...it might be a little rough because of thermals. And remember – don’t do anything you do not have to and do it only a little bit and real slow. It will take off by itself if you let it."

This was true. It had a long tail, long wings, and it was light. It was little more than a powered glider.

I did all this and we flew around for about an hour. We didn’t go any where particularly but he was still telling me "...why don’t you head out for Rosita (8 miles east) and then fly north to Seven Sisters (15 miles north)."

All this was flying just to be flying.

At some point after flying to Seven Sisters and wandering back, we saw the Freer airstrip and he said, "OK, I think we need to head back to the house...I will take it now."

I remember thinking, ‘Why? I could probably land this thing just fine.’ This thought shows that no one thinking this should try to land an airplane. Still, my feelings were hurt.

I did land a couple of flights later – with his hands resting lightly on the yoke. He was hands off maybe the last four flights.

By then, I was comfortable with the plane but he would still taxi it for take off when there was a lot of wind. I had let the tail swing around on me a couple of times when taxiing down wind. But I was taking off and landing and he was doing the flying around the sky. I became "his" backup as his vision was getting worse.

Mr. Brooks finally sold the Taylorcraft to a local flier who moved it out to his ranch.

So by the time I was in the eighth grade, I had ended up with a fair amount of light plane flight time.